As the internet continues to grow in popularity and pervasiveness so do the products and services that use it. The large number of internet users spread throughout the world and the wide variety of hardware components and software used therein presents numerous opportunities for the media streams to become impaired. Such impairments may include a low signal level, a high noise level, or a low mean opinion score. The impairments may, for example, be caused by packet loss between the two endpoints, excessive traffic at any of the components between the two endpoints, endpoints out of sync with each other, or incompatible hardware or software between the two endpoints or other components. The possibility of media degradation has caused some users to be hesitant about switching from traditional products or services to products or services that use internet protocol (IP).
To help ensure the quality of the products and services enabled by the internet, some products and services include diagnostic capabilities that may report the quality of the service. More specifically, nodes that support internet protocol communication sessions may monitor the media quality of these sessions and send reports when critical metrics exceed certain thresholds (in instances where the quality of the communication session is degraded but not terminated). However, in the event of a network component failure generating a high volume of diagnostic reports may exacerbate rather than help the situation. Furthermore, the large number of reports may provide an information overload, when what is desired is to know what the problem is and to have an assessment of the overall impact of the problem.
To help protect against this some products provide for a minimum spacing between reports to help alleviate the additional strain caused by generating a report for every call. Unfortunately this may cause the loss of detailed information for some calls and, in some instances, only postpones sending the same amount of information (e.g. five separate reports sent out over a period of time instead of immediately one after the other). Furthermore, in nodes that support a large number of communication sessions, a large scale problem may still generate a large number of reports that are more of a hindrance than a help.